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A CONCEPTION OF “THE PEOPLE”: THE PEOPLE AS ONE BODY

One common feature of populist movements is that they establish the people as the central figure of democracy. Some will call this a tautology, given that the demos is sovereign by definition in a type of regime whose name itself refers to the demos. And every good democrat is necessarily a populist, in this very general sense. But the self-evident statement is as fuzzy in practical terms as it seems to be imperative conceptually. Who is in fact this governing people? The question never fails to come up. From the outset, it has been invoked in endless oscillation between a reference to the people as a civic body, a figure of political generality expressing unity, and reference to the people as a social group, a figure conflated de facto with a specific segment of the population. When the Americans began the preamble to their Constitution in 1787 with the words “We the People,” they were using the term in the first sense. It was in that sense, too, that the French revolutionaries consistently linked references to the people with references to the nation (a term that referred explicitly, for its part, only to a historical and political notion). This people stemmed from a constitutional principle or from a political philosophy before it had any concrete existence (moreover, when it did come into being, it took the reduced form of a rarely unanimous electoral body). But in 1789, when one spoke about the people who had stormed the Bastille, the reference was also to a crowd that had a face – as did the crowd that gathered in 1791 on the Champ-de-Mars to celebrate the Federation, and the crowds that erected the barricades in 1830 or 1848. The people existed, in these cases, in the form of specific manifestations. The people to whom Jules Michelet or Victor Hugo referred had a perceptible consistency: they were les petites gens, the bottom layers of society (those featured by Hugo as “the wretched” in his novel Les Misérables). In this case, one could speak of a “social people,” the people as a specific social group. It was imperative to tell this people’s story, to bring it to the fore, in order to constitute it and pay it homage through the representation of particular existences. A more sociological approach gradually took hold and defined the contours of this people. The social people then took on the name proletariat, working class, or “popular classes” (the plural taking into account the complexity of social structures). The language of class thus gave the term “people” a particular meaning. But this reduction in scope was corrected by a statistical fact, namely, the numerical preponderance of a world of workers that had its own pronounced identity – further complicated by the fact that Marxism saw the working class as the forerunner of a new universalism: the classless society.

      Although these two peoples, the people as a social group and the people as a civic body, did not coincide, they were nevertheless inscribed in a common narrative and a common vision, that of achieving a democracy understood simultaneously as a governing regime and as a form of society. The prospect of such an achievement dimmed at the turn of the twenty-first century, in two ways. First, electoral bodies have suffered a certain atrophy: a growing rate of voter abstention expresses both the rejection of traditional parties and the feeling of being poorly represented. This atrophy can be seen in the decline in voter turnout, that is, in the democratic exercise of expressing one’s opinion at the ballot box.¹ Next, in sociological terms, societies have been affected by increasing individualization as well as by the transformation of living and working conditions that has shaped unprecedented modalities of exploitation, relegation, and domination. These insufficiently studied upheavals have reinforced feelings of inadequate representation and invisibility for a growing part of the population in most countries. Under such conditions, “the people” has become “unlocatable.”² It is in this context that the populist notion of the people has been forged, proposing a purportedly more appropriate evocation of the present and embedding itself within a perspective intended to mobilize a refounding of democracy.

From class to people

The populist project of refounding democracy by restoring the centrality of the idea of a people is based in the first place on the abandonment of analyses of the social world in class terms. The arguments of two of the chief exponents of left populism, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, are very revealing on this point. Coming out of a Marxist tradition, these authors observe that ownership of the means of production, with the exploitative relations that ensue, is no longer the only or even the principal issue shaping the contemporary social divide. For the conflicts structuring public space have now spread into new fields: relations between men and women, territorial inequalities, questions of identity and discrimination, for example. But they have also spread into everything that is felt to be an infringement on personal dignity; such infringements are experienced as intolerable forms of distancing and domination (populist discourse reflects this by promising to restore pride even before the question of increased buying power arises). In this context, there is no longer a single class struggle that polarizes things all by itself, just as there is no longer a single social class that essentially bears the hope for humanity’s emancipation (the working class, the proletariat). “The populist moment,” Chantal Mouffe writes,

      is the expression of a set of heterogeneous demands, which cannot be formulated merely in terms of interests linked to specific social categories. Furthermore, in neoliberal capitalism new forms of subordination have emerged outside the productive process. They have given rise to demands that no longer correspond to social sectors defined in sociological terms and by their location in the social structure . . . This is why today the political frontier needs to be constructed in a “populist” transversal mode.³

      As Mouffe sees it, this new frontier is the one that opposes “the people” to “the oligarchy.” Ernesto Laclau deduces from this argument that

      populism is not an ideology but a mode of construction of the political, based on splitting society in two and calling for the mobilization of “those at the bottom” against the existing authorities. There is populism every time

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